Report: `3 Strikes And Out' Law Is A Foul Ball California's Version Is Resulting In The Jailing Of Many Nonviolent Criminals.

March 09, 1996|by FOX BUTTERFIELD, The New York Times

Two years after California's tough "three strikes and you're out" law went into effect, twice as many defendants have been imprisoned under the law for marijuana possession as for murder, rape and kidnapping combined, according to a study.

Overall, 85 percent of those receiving stiffer sentences under the law had been convicted most recently of a nonviolent offense, the study found.

"We're worried about Willie Horton and we lock up the Three Stooges," said Franklin Zimring, director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute at the University of California at Berkeley, referring to the repeat offender featured in a television ad in the 1988 presidential election.

But Gov. Pete Wilson credited the law with reducing the state's crime rate two years in a row, the first time that has happened in 40 years.

The report, by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, also found that blacks are being sent to prison at a rate 13 times that of whites.

To be prosecuted under the law, a defendant must have been convicted of one or more serious or violent crimes in the past -- but the most recent need only be a felony, not necessarily a violent one.

The law mandates double the normal sentence for anyone convicted of a second felony and a life sentence for a criminal convicted of a third felony.

The new figures provide ammunition for opponents of the law, which has also been blamed for delaying civil trials in some cities, overcrowding local jails with defendants who refuse plea bargains and causing fiscal difficulty for many counties already strapped by restrictions on raising local property taxes.

While blacks make up only 7 percent of California's population and account for 31 percent of the state's prisoners, they constitute 43 percent of those sentenced under the new law, the study said.

"If one were writing a law to deliberately target blacks, one could scarcely have done it more effectively than `three strikes,'" said Vincent Schiraldi, an author of the report and center director.

The law, signed by Wilson on March 7, 1994, is the most harshly worded of a series of similar statutes enacted around the nation. Other states require that all the crimes be violent felonies.

At a news conference Wednesday, Wilson said that the law was an "integral reason why we're winning the war against crime." However, crime rates have dropped in a number of big cities around the nation over the past few years in states without a "three strikes" law.

Wilson did not address the issue of racial disparity in sentencing. But J.P. Tremblay, a spokesman for the California Youth and Adult Correctional Agency, which administers the state's prisons, charged that Schiraldi "is trying to distract from the usefulness of the law."

"The law has nothing to do with race," Tremblay said. "It has to do with individual choices and family background and how people are raised."

Zimring said that the most-disturbing finding in the report was that the law is being used disproportionately to incarcerate nonviolent criminals.

This means that resources are being spent on nonviolent offenders.

"Large doses of punishment are being given to trivial crimes," he said. "That is a perverse way to crack down on crime."

Zimring said that the figures on racial disparity were disturbing but that they did not clarify the difficult question of what created the differences -- the law itself, the way it has been applied by judges and prosecutors or a broader social problem.

James Bascue, the supervising judge of the Los Angeles County courts, said that the law had caused huge increases in costs and had caused his county's justice system to be "basically in distress."